Vara announces on the last day of the campaign that he will not run again as a candidate for the Junta de Extremadura
It is not the first time that it has been announced in recent years, although now it does seem that it will be the final one.. The socialist baron of Extremadura, Guillermo Fernández Vara, has waited for the last day of this campaign to ensure that he will no longer be a candidate for the Junta de Extremadura.
After 12 years at the head of the regional administration of Extremadura (eight in a row plus another previous legislature, which was interrupted when José Antonio Monago won the elections in 2011), Fernández Vara surprised this morning by confirming that this 2023 -in which he is presented for the fifth time- “is the last, which is always important in life,” he warned. The general secretary of the socialists from Extremadura, before becoming president of the Board, had been Minister of Health in the government of Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, and became his successor.
It is not the first time that the retirement of Fernández Vara, who turns 65 in October, is on the table. The last time it was in this same legislature, where it gave rise to speculation about whether he would head the list of the PSOE in Extremadura, a question that he did not reveal until last year, even having renewed his position as general secretary of the PSOE of Extremadura. This fact unleashed, although behind the scenes, the first movements for his succession, led by the mayor of Villanueva de la Serena, Miguel Ángel Gallardo, who in turn is president of the Badajoz Provincial Council.. There has also been talk of the possibility of the current Minister of Health, José María Vergeles, and even the mayor of Mérida, Antonio Rodríguez Osuna.
“Reasonable to give way” to others
Fernández Vara's announcement this Friday also coincides with another made in the last hours, in an interview in the newspaper Hoy, in which he has advanced that if he does not govern, his “political life” will have ended, advancing that he would not be in the opposition as he did in the legislature from 2011 to 2015, years that were the worst of his political life and from which he also felt the political detachment, from many of his own party, from the defeated: “I think it would be reasonable to give way”, although he has also warned that this possibility, that of electoral defeat, “is not going to happen, although some would be glad if it did”. Of course, he assured that he would like to finish closing the circle of his life by returning to the activity of a forensic doctor.
In parallel, there has also been speculation about the possibility that Vara had run for these elections but with the intention of holding out at most until halfway through the legislature to resign and make way for his successor or undertake a last political stage in Madrid. an issue that he has always ruled out despite the offers he has had at certain times to become a minister in various socialist governments.
According to all the surveys, the PSOE will lose the absolute majority that it enjoys in this legislature and will be forced to agree with Podemos to govern in Extremadura, while the PP and Vox bloc would also be close to being able to reach the figure of 33 deputies, the limit to govern.